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GuardianSep 27Preview

Eva Longoria: Searching for France review – this lovely travel show radiates charm

It’s light stuff with more than a touch of Emily in Paris to it, but the actor’s latest travelogue has enough passion to make it highly endearing TV‘I’m Eva Longoria and I’m a SERIOUS Francophile!” So begins each instalment of the actor’s Gallic travelogue. France, says Longoria, “is my home away from home”, although she’s usually in the country for work, rather than to experience its abundance of “joie de vivre”. (She does, she notes, have some extracurricular experience with the French, having previously been married to the French-American basketball player Tony Parker for three years.) Now, though, she is on her own adventure, having returned to l’Hexagone for something “deeper”. Cut to a clip of our intrepid guide in a vineyard, getting acquainted with cabernet sauvignon grapes (“That’s my favourite!” she whispers animatedly), before we segue to her floating gracefully past the Eiffe

Hannah J DaviesTelevisionCulture

GuardianSep 25Preview

The Guardian view on Trump and Xi: a show of friendship, but no real attempt to address the tensions | Editorial

The Chinese leader’s visit to Washington appears to have done nothing to shift the stalemate in bilateral relations Within days, two high-profile Chinese visitors will arrive in the US – envoys of friendship, as Xi Jinping described them when he met Donald Trump at the White House this week. The giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, will be hosted at Atlanta zoo. Beijing dispatched the first panda pair to the US in 1972 following President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit to China. It uses the animals to indicate satisfaction or displeasure with other nations. But it also charges heftily for their lease: reportedly, around $1m a year per pair. Americans’ views of China have warmed from a pandemic nadir, but are unlikely to be shifted much by two animals, however charming. These days they are more of a token gesture than a striking symbol.It is telling that the announcement was one of the

EditorialDonald TrumpXi Jinping

GuardianSep 25Preview

Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore review – flashes of humanity and bafflingly vindictive love songs

(Republic)This four-track addition to a critically maligned album works hard to remind fans what they love about Swift, with some sweet highs and galling lowsOne downside of turning your release strategies into scavenger hunts and layering clues within your work is that it invites enormous amounts of scrutiny about your potential motive. When Taylor Swift announced an expanded edition of last year’s critically maligned The Life of a Showgirl this week, subtitled The Encore, many fans instantly suspected one of two things: that it was designed to remind Grammy members of Showgirl’s existence during their voting period to determine next year’s nominees, or to oust country ingenue Ella Langley from her record-breaking US No 1 run.If that sounds cynical, it’s also worth remembering that when Swift announced Showgirl last year, she said that unlike her previous album, The Tortured Poets Depar

Laura SnapesTaylor SwiftMusic

GuardianSep 25Preview

East of Eden to Kill Jackie: the seven best shows to stream this week

Florence Pugh shines as the icy sociopath at the heart of the Steinbeck classic, plus Catherine Zeta-Jones plays an international cocaine dealer in a truly bananas thriller“A girl like that doesn’t just fall out of the sky.” Charles Trask has a bad feeling about Cathy Ames, the woman who has arrived, beaten almost to death, on the doorstep of the farm he shares with his brother Adam. But it’s too late – Adam is smitten and therefore doomed. Zoe Kazan is behind this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s study of family, free will and arbitrary evil. Her new twist is a closer focus on Cathy (played with icy sweetness by Florence Pugh). She’s a more ambiguous figure here: not a purely sociopathic destroyer of lives but instead a ruthless survivor at all costs. The script doesn’t always do the ideas justice but there’s still plenty to like. Netflix, from Thursday 1 October Continue reading...

Phil HarrisonTelevision & radioTV streaming

BBCSep 8Preview

Chris Mason: Burnham looks to show he will go further than Starmer with West Bank sanctions

It is hoped that coordinated action minimises the blowback to any one country from Israel or America, our political editor writes.